Kholodov's Last Mistress

‘Sorry,’ she said, her lips twitching. ‘I distracted you then from your manly effort.’

He didn’t like that either, judging by his scowl. ‘I could have come over sooner,’ he told her. ‘I saw what those kids were doing.’

‘You watched?’

‘I waited a moment too long,’ he clarified. ‘And in any case, you don’t have many options.’

That was certainly true. ‘I’m still not sure how that affects you,’ Hannah said.

‘You can stay the night at my hotel. In the morning I can help you sort something out with the police and the embassy.’

He made it sound so simple. Maybe there was a get-out-of-jail-free card after all. ‘That’s very nice of you,’ Hannah said at last. She still felt uncertain, even suspicious. It seemed too easy. Too nice. For him, anyway. ‘What hotel?’ she finally asked as her mind considered and discarded non-existent possibilities.

‘The Kholodov.’

‘The Kholodov?’ It was one of the most luxurious hotels in Moscow, and way, way out of her budget. And he, she recalled from the card, was Sergei Kholodov. That Kholodov.

Now his mouth kicked up at one corner, and even though it still wasn’t really a smile it transformed his face, lightening his eyes, softening his features, so Hannah felt a sudden blazing bolt of awareness ignite her senses. When he smiled he really did look amazing.

‘You’ve heard of it.’

‘Hasn’t everyone?’

He shrugged even as his mouth quirked a little more, revealing a surprising dimple. The assassin had a dimple. She felt another bolt of awareness, as if her senses had been struck by lightning. It wasn’t, she decided, an unpleasant sensation. Not at all.

‘So,’ he said, ‘you might as well stay there.’

Hannah hesitated. She believed in the best of people, wanted to believe in the best in him. She just didn’t want to be even more foolish than she’d already been. ‘It’s very nice of you to offer—’

‘If you’re worried about security, you can take a taxi yourself to the hotel. I’ll pay for the fare.’

‘You don’t—’

He arched an eyebrow. ‘You don’t have any money, do you? And trust me, it is no trouble. I have empty rooms. I have plenty of money. And,’ he added, glancing at his watch, ‘I have things to do. So make up your mind.’

When he put it like that, it sounded sensible. And surely her best option. ‘Okay,’ Hannah said at last. ‘Thank you.’

‘I told you, it is no trouble.’ Sergei stretched one arm out towards the street and within seconds a taxi cab had screeched to a halt in front of him. Sergei dismissed it, and the next one he flagged as well, explaining tersely, ‘They’re both unmarked. You’ll feel safer in an official taxi, with a meter.’ His consideration for such a detail touched her.

Finally a legit taxi pulled to the kerb, and Sergei opened the door. ‘The Kholodov,’ he told the driver, handing him a wad of rubles. He glanced at Hannah. ‘I’ll phone and make sure they’re expecting you. We can get your bags sent over later. Is that sufficient?’

Sufficient? It was crazy. Yet she understood what he was asking, that he was taking these measures to make her feel safe, and she appreciated it more than she could put into words. He’d saved her, quite literally. ‘Thank you. I don’t know what to—’

‘Go.’ He practically pushed her towards the cab, and then slammed the door as soon as she’d slid into the seat.

‘Say,’ she finished in a whisper as the cab sped away into the darkness and she wondered if she’d ever see her saviour again.

CHAPTER TWO

‘YOU wanted to know about the girl?’

Sergei glanced up from the papers he’d been scanning to scowl at his assistant, Grigori. The girl …

Hannah Pearl, he’d discovered with a little bit of research, lone traveller, ditzy American. He did not want to know about the girl—even if he hadn’t been able to get her out of his mind since he’d sent her off in a taxi two hours ago. He’d come back to his office, changed out of the street clothes he wore whenever he went to the unsavoury areas of the city in search of Varya. He hadn’t found her; he’d found a beguiling American instead.

Even now he found himself thinking about the violet of her eyes, those rose-pink lips. He wondered what kind of figure her bulky parka had hid. But even more so than her physical charms, of which he acknowledged she had several, he’d been bizarrely fascinated—and irritated—by her honesty. Her optimism. She’d seemed so … unspoiled. When had he last encountered a person—a woman—like that?

‘She’s settled?’ he asked tersely. That was all he needed to know.

‘Yes, in the grand suite.’

He’d given her the best room in the hotel. Stupid, perhaps, and unnecessary, but he hadn’t liked seeing her looking so lost as she stood on the steps of the embassy. He hated seeing people vulnerable, hated seeing that shadow of uncertainty and fear in someone’s eyes. He’d seen it far too often. And for a moment, a crazy, regrettable moment, the American had actually reminded him of Alyona. And he never thought of Alyona.

Yet in that moment on the steps when Hannah’s eyes had clouded and she’d lifted her chin—seeming, for an instant, so brave—she had reminded him, and it had made him approach her, offer things he’d had no intention of offering. Feel things he didn’t want to feel.

Of course, he’d already made the decision to find her at the embassy when he’d seen her on the steps, felt that protective tug. When she’d walked away from him in Red Square he’d felt something else he didn’t like to feel: guilt. He’d watched those kids run their grift and he could have stopped it sooner. Maybe if he had, if he hadn’t taken those few scornful seconds to just watch, she’d still have her money and passport. She’d be on a plane back to America, instead of upstairs in the best room of his hotel.

Upstairs …

Now his mind—and body—went in a totally different direction. He didn’t feel protective so much as … possessive. He was curious about the body hidden beneath that parka, those eyes that darkened to storm when she felt something other than that relentless optimism. Curious and also determined that the only thing this woman would awaken in him was lust.

Impulsively, yet with iron-like decisiveness, he reached for a piece of heavy ivory stationery embossed with the Kholodov crest and scrawled a message. Folding it, he handed it to Grigori with a level look that ensured no more questions would be asked. ‘Deliver that to her. And prepare the private booth at the restaurant for dinner. For two.’

Grigori nodded and hesitated by the door. ‘You found Varya?’ he asked and Sergei let out a heavy sigh.

‘No.’ He’d been too distracted by a certain American to devote any more time to his search for Varya. He knew she was in trouble again; the tearful, incoherent message on his private voice mail had given testament to that. Yet when was Varya not in trouble?

‘She’ll turn up again,’ Grigori said, and Sergei knew he was trying to convince himself more than Sergei. The three of them had banded together back in the orphanage, and Grigori, Sergei suspected, was more than half in love with Varya, and had been since they were children. ‘She always does.’

‘Yes.’ Yet he did not want Varya to turn up as a nameless, disease-riddled corpse forgotten in a doorway or floating in the Moskva River. But how many times could he save her? He’d already learned to his own frustration and sometimes despair how few people you could really save. Sometimes not even yourself.

Grigori held up the note, and Sergei half regretted his impulse to write it. ‘I’ll deliver this now.’ He nodded his assent, knowing it was too late for regrets. And better that he put Hannah Pearl in her place as a woman to be desired and discarded rather than anything else. Anything deeper.

A woman who made him think of Alyona, and remember the kind of boy he’d once been, as youthful and naive as she so obviously still was.

No, Sergei thought as he gazed moodily out at a darkening sky, this was much better.

Hannah gazed around the gorgeous hotel suite, half afraid to touch anything. The place was amazing. And huge. She’d actually thought the closet was another bedroom, until she’d realised there was no bed in it.

What kind of man was Sergei Kholodov anyway?

A tremor ran through her, something half between alarm and excitement. He was that kind of man. She might not have a lot of experience when it came to men—Hadley Springs didn’t have a great dating scene—but she still recognised her own reaction. There was something so blatantly sexy about Sergei Kholodov, the way he emanated all that authority, the iciness of his eyes, the leashed power of his body. She’d never been with a more exciting person. Man.

Yet it hardly mattered, because Hannah doubted she’d ever see him again. His kindness was already more than Hannah had ever expected. So why was she still thinking about him?

It was hard not to think of him. The events of the last few hours had been both surreal and overwhelming, from the first moment that Sergei had strode across Red Square, to seeing him outside the American Embassy, to entering his amazing and opulent hotel. It was the stuff of fantasies, of soap operas, not the life of a very ordinary woman from a tiny town in upstate New York. Nothing like this had happened to her for the entire three months of her trip, and now on the last day her world was spinning.

Well, hopefully it would settle right back on its axis tomorrow, when Sergei helped her get a passport and a plane out of here.